A B.C. mountaineer is at the centre of an international storm after he and his American climbing partner scaled Argentina’s legendary Cerro Torre — once considered the hardest peak on Earth to conquer — then arbitrarily removed many of the 400 bolts that had been drilled into its dizzyingly vertical rock face more than 40 years ago.

The bolts were added by controversial Italian climber Cesare Maestri in 1970 when he completed a history-making but helicopter-assisted first ascent to the summit.

Jason Kruk, a 24-year-old professional mountain climber from Squamish, describes Maestri’s step-ladder of bolts on the 3,128-metre Cerro Torre (or “Tower Hill”) as a “complete atrocity” that demanded action from a new generation of alpinists to restore “respect for the mountain.”

But what he calls the cleansing removal of Maestri’s “garbage” during the January expedition to Patagonia has sparked a fierce debate within the global climbing community, and temporarily led Kruk and Hayden Kennedy, his 21-year-old climbing companion from Colorado, to be detained for questioning by police in the Argentine town of El Chalten, a tourist hub at the foot of the mountain.

While Rolando Garibotti, a leading South American climber, has praised the duo’s “inspired” response to Maestri’s infamous “act of vandalism,” Kruk and Kennedy’s de-bolting of Cerro Torre led a group of Italian climbers to issue a statement condemning the “militant and arrogant” action, “the result of a unilateral decision and of a concept of mountaineering which lacks respect for those of the past.”

The removal of the bolts also prompted outrage among some Argentine locals in El Chalten, who confronted the young climbers after their descent from the mountain.

“It was quite late at night,” Kruk told Postmedia News, recalling the hours following their Jan. 15 climb. “I was in town trying to make a phone call, and some folks saw me, and they got a bunch of people together ... I had about 40 people very angry with me. They called the cops.”

The adventurer said the police were reasonable and “we weren’t arrested or anything.” Kruk and Kennedy handed over the bolts they’d removed from the mountain, which he expects will be given to the local alpine club for safekeeping or display.

“In our mind they were trash,” said Kruk, “and we didn’t want people to accuse us of leaving trash in the mountain.”

Some critics have accused Kruk and Kennedy of destroying artifacts and disturbing a heritage site linked to a landmark event in the international history of mountaineering.

The 82-year-old Maestri, hailed by some as a climbing icon but dismissed by others as a fraud, gained fame in 1959 after claiming to have conquered another sheer face of Cerro Torre in an ascent that killed his partner, Austrian guide Toni Egger, and led to widespread and enduring doubt that the pair had really reached the summit.

Maestri’s climb on a southeast route up Cerro Torre, partly intended to counter doubts that his 1959 claims were true, was accomplished with the help of an airlifted compressor used for drilling the 400 bolts into the steep ridge as climbing aids.

Maestri’s technique generated criticism at the time, with Italian-born mountaineer Reinhold Messner penning a landmark essay — titled Murdering the Impossible — in which he eloquently lamented the overuse of technology and the decline of raw human ingenuity in completing difficult ascents.

“One of the few things that climbers can agree upon is that the style and equipment that Cesare Maestri used back in 1970 went far beyond what was accepted globally, even for the time,” said Kruk. “He had a helicopter fly out a 350-pound, gasoline-powered compressor, and he used a winch to basically haul this compressor up the sheer granite mountain, and used it to power a drill.”

The route that Maestri contentiously established is known as “The Compressor,” and the very machine he used to attach the bolts removed by Kruk and Kennedy is still anchored to the rock wall near Cerro Torre’s summit.

I wouldn’t trim this bit:The two mountaineers issued an open letter to fellow alpinists explaining their actions.

“There has been a lot of talk over the years about chopping the Compressor bolts,” they wrote. “Undoubtedly, it is a lot easier to talk about it than to actually do it and deal with the consequences. After a lengthy introspection on the summit, we knew the act needed to be initiated by one party, without consensus.”

They added that while mountains should generally be climbed by “free means” — using as few mechanical aids and leaving as few traces of a human presence as possible — “fair means does not mean no bolts. Reasonable use of bolts has been a long-accepted practice in this mountain range. Often, steep, blank granite would be folly without the sparing [use] of this type of protection.”

But Kruk and Kennedy described Maestri’s indiscriminate drilling of the cliff-face as an “outrageous” act.

“Cerro Torre, a mountain so perfectly steep on all sides, is the postcard for the ideal that is alpinism. There should be no easy way to the top,” they argued. “Who committed the act of violence against Cerro Torre? Maestri, by installing the bolts, or us, by removing them?”

Kruk said he was “very surprised” that the controversy over Cerro Torre has garnered attention outside of the climbing community. “It’s gone beyond what I would have ever imagined,” he said, adding he has no regrets.

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